Outdoors: Though frigid here, global warming is evident elsewhere

Monday

Mar 3, 2014 at 11:38 PMMar 4, 2014 at 1:57 PM

The brutal winter of 2014 has been reason for many to joke about global warming. But even as our deepest Cape Cod trout ponds freeze over for the first time in several years and our 75 percent-filled reservoirs are poised to be topped off with spring snow melt, much of the rest of the world isn't joking.

From our food belt in Southern California to the cattle lands of Texas, the lands are parched, and for most of the Southern Hemisphere, global warming, drought and desertification are a clear reality.

I have a hunt for deer and water buffalo coming up shortly in Australia. My friends there just informed me that outback temperatures have been on fire this winter. The year 2013 was the hottest ever recorded down under.

Checking with the South African guide whom I'll also be hunting with later this year, the Limpopo region has been oppressive, around 100 degrees all winter.

Meanwhile, in our own hemisphere, glacier-covered Greenland, the calving ground of our North Atlantic icebergs, has been 8 degrees above normal. The jet stream may be relentlessly funneling Siberian chills down upon us, but it has been heating up much of the rest of the planet.

While two-thirds of polled Democrats believe that humans are affecting climate change, only one-quarter of polled Republicans agree. One party is more right than the other. Unfortunately, the one that's wrong could have an everlasting impact on our planet's future.

The coldest day ever recorded was July 21, 1983, when temperatures at the Russian South Pole hit minus 128.6. Our brutally cold winter seems benign in comparison.

Considering most of our cold originates from Siberia, it's remarkable that the same region broke heat records last summer. Thermometers there registered an unprecedented 89 degrees in Norilsk, the most northern city in the world, and wildfires erupted throughout the region.

Venturing on several occasions high up in Arctic Canada to hunt from Baffin Island to Victoria Island, I've regularly asked Inuits their thoughts on global warming. They typically laugh, lamenting that it's always cold in the Arctic. But they tell me something very revealing. It has been snowing much more there lately.

In the polar desert, where it's typically too cold to snow very much, the recent increase in precipitation is clearly the result of warmer air being able to hold and release more moisture.

With Auburn's Dr. Lawrence Reich, I recently hunted musk ox in Cambridge Bay, which lies adjacent to the Northwest Passage. It is the land where many explorers' boats iced in, they suffered scurvy and starvation, and died.

Sir John Franklin's 1845 expedition, notable for its desperate cannibalism, was victim to the extreme winter cold of years past. Ice there has opened enough in recent years for tourist ships to sail through.

Just as remarkable, the first western ships ever were recently able to sail from Germany through the Northeast Passage, as melting ice further opened a path from South Korea to Siberia. With commercial movement of huge ships likely to emerge soon on a grand scale across the Arctic Circle, the newly widened Panama Canal may lose its monopoly on transoceanic shipping from Asia to Europe. The economic impact could be enormous.

Inuits also shared with me that several southern species have recently moved north. For the first time, beaver are being found in ocean-side harbors of Victoria Island, and dangerous grizzly bears have crossed the frozen passage entering their village. And mussels are prominently growing there for the first time as well.

Changes in the Arctic elsewhere are affecting the polar bears of Hudson Bay. We used to count on them congregating there beginning in late October. Now the ice is forming about three weeks later, and melting about three weeks earlier, shortening by about six weeks the time they can venture out on to the ice and hunt seals. With less time to accumulate fat, female polar bears are producing fewer young.

Closer to home, we've had our sub-Arctic migrating smelt populations retreat north. No longer are they spawning up into the Delaware River, and their populations have virtually disappeared in much of New York and Connecticut. They're diminishing in Massachusetts, too, as waters warm.

Local alewives — both river and blueback herring — no longer range as far south as South Carolina, and as waters warm, they're entering our local streams earlier each year.

And our two southern-most Atlantic salmon rivers, the Housatonic and Connecticut, have lost their runs.

Our local bird life has changed with global warming, too. Southern species like cardinals, titmice, mockingbirds, Carolina wrens and red-bellied woodpeckers have moved in abundantly during my lifetime.

Meanwhile, down in the Amazon, from which I just returned last week, it never rained the entire time we were in the rain forest. The Mississippi-sized Napo River had football field-sized sandbars exposed to the air.

Taking a dugout canoe trip often meant walking hundreds of extra yards to water that was deep enough to launch from.

Earlier last summer in Massachusetts, after a week of sweltering, 90-degree temperatures more typical of South Carolina, I got a note from my scientist brother-in-law in Colorado worrying about forest fires destroying all the homes around him.

He survived the fires, but is sufficiently alarmed by drought and diminishing water supplies to consider moving out of Colorado.

After thousands of years, we're still pondering whether the world will end by fire or ice. Our local cold weather shouldn't cloud our understanding of what is occurring globally.

For the dinosaurs, of course, life ended with ice. For us, the denouement — still to be determined — might likely be impacted by indecision. Even our Supreme Court is currently torn by party philosophy on an EPA ruling which would drastically affect our country's carbon emissions. Globally, we're not uniting to avert catastrophe.

Many Americans argue that if recalcitrant China and India don't follow suit, our sacrifices will mean little — and only hurt our lifestyle and economy.

Without more cautious resolve, however, we're likely to experience more extreme tropical torrents along with our relentless Montreal Express in future years. We need to get our carbon-emitting policies right, and soon.